Librarians help students navigate an age of misinformation – but schools are cutting their numbers; The Conversation, November 5, 2021

Karen W. Gavigan, The Conversation;  Librarians help students navigate an age of misinformation – but schools are cutting their numbers

"“Access to school librarians has become a major educational equity issue,” says Keith Curry Lance, who with Debra Kachel led the IMLS study. In a recent email he told me, “School districts losing librarians tend to be ones that can least afford the loss in a society characterized by increasing economic inequality.”...

School librarians also work to ensure that students are taught issues of intellectual freedom. They collaborate with teachers to help students understand the ethical use of ideas and information."

Facebook whistleblower revealed on '60 Minutes,' says the company prioritized profit over public good; CNN, October 4, 2021

Clare Duffy , CNN; Facebook whistleblower revealed on '60 Minutes,' says the company prioritized profit over public good

"The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money," Haugen told "60 Minutes." 

"60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelly quoted one internal Facebook (FB) document as saying: "We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world.""

Whistleblower: Facebook is misleading the public on progress against hate speech, violence, misinformation; 60 Minutes, October 4, 2021

Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes ; Whistleblower: Facebook is misleading the public on progress against hate speech, violence, misinformation

"Her name is Frances Haugen. That is a fact that Facebook has been anxious to know since last month when an anonymous former employee filed complaints with federal law enforcement. The complaints say Facebook's own research shows that it amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest—but the company hides what it knows. One complaint alleges that Facebook's Instagram harms teenage girls. What makes Haugen's complaints unprecedented is the trove of private Facebook research she took when she quit in May. The documents appeared first, last month, in the Wall Street Journal. But tonight, Frances Haugen is revealing her identity to explain why she became the Facebook whistleblower.

• Facebook's response to 60 Minutes' report, "The Facebook Whistleblower"
• Facebook whistleblower says company incentivizes "angry, polarizing, divisive content"
  
• Watch Live: Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before Senate committee
  

Frances Haugen: The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money. 

Frances Haugen is 37, a data scientist from Iowa with a degree in computer engineering and a Harvard master's degree in business. For 15 years she's worked for companies including Google and Pinterest.

Frances Haugen: I've seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I'd seen before."

A matter of ethics; BC News, April 2021

Phil Gloudemans , BC News; 

A matter of ethics

BC undergraduates advanced to the finals at the 25th annual Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl

"“The format of the Ethics Bowl is unique from other debate-style competitions in that teams are scored based on how well they consider the merit of all sides of an argument,” said team member Angela McCarthy ’21, president of the student-organized Bioethics Society of Boston College. “The spirit of the Ethics Bowl encourages respectful deliberation over some of the most controversial issues of our time. Instead of encouraging an ‘us versus them mentality,’ it promotes productive conversations about controversial issues.”

“I was so proud to see their preparation pay off in their performance at nationals,” said BC team coach Katie Rapier, an assistant professor of philosophy. “The students responded to their opponents and the judges with both professionalism and finesse, and a robust understanding of the material through clear explanations and compelling arguments.  I was thrilled to see such a rich display of learning and skill from our students.”

In advance of competition, each team receives a set of APPE-written cases that explore a variety of topics within practical and professional ethics that could range from cheating and plagiarism, dating and friendships, to free speech, gun control or professional principles in medicine, engineering, or law.  

Teams prepare an analysis of each case, and during a match, a case is randomly selected from the set, and teams have three minutes to huddle before giving a 10-minute presentation.  A moderator poses questions designed to delve deeper into the case’s multiple ethical dimensions.

A panel of judges then probes the teams for further justifications and evaluates their answers. Rating criteria are based on intelligibility, focus on ethically relevant considerations, avoidance of ethical irrelevance, and deliberative thoughtfulness. Teams cannot bring notes or confer with coaches...

Senior philosophy major Caroline Gillette focused on two cases that dealt with the ethics of moderating content on social media, both offensive speech and misinformation."

The Most Popular J&J Vaccine Story On Facebook? A Conspiracy Theorist Posted It; NPR, April 15, 2021

Miles Parks, NPR ; The Most Popular J&J Vaccine Story On Facebook? A Conspiracy Theorist Posted It

""This is what I would call the perfect storm for misinformation," said Jennifer Granston at Zignal Labs, a media intelligence platform...

In most cases, the social media companies say they can't do much to respond in cases such as this, since people largely are sharing articles based on factual information, even if the commentary and subtext around the posting is meant to further false ideas.

"It's a really insidious problem," said Deen Freelon, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in an interview with NPR last month. "The social media companies have taken a hard line against disinformation; they have not taken a similarly hard line against fallacies."

Many anti-vaccine activists have adopted this tactic as a way of getting around social media networks' policies designed to halt the spread of false information....

Often, misinformation peddlers with a specific agenda will fill in knowledge gaps with false information, knowing people are desperate for any information at all."

 

Pitt Cyber Presents: Battling the Infodemic: Covid-19 Mis- and Disinformation; University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security, February 16, 2021

University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security ; Pitt Cyber Presents: Battling the Infodemic: Covid-19 Mis- and Disinformation

"February 16, 2021 - 

2:00pm to 3:30pm

Add to Calendar

Battling the Infodemic: Covid-19 Mis- and Disinformation 

Please join Pitt Cyber for a timely conversation about how mis- and disinformation could jeopardize control of the pandemic. Disinformation and medical experts will discuss what’s happening, what to expect, and what we can do. 

The discussion will feature: 

Michael Colaresi, Pitt Cyber Research and Academic Director and Professor of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh 

Beth Hoffman, Research Assistant, Center for Research on Behavioral Health, Media, & Technology; PhD student, Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh 

Jaime Sidani, Assistant Professor of Medicine; Core Faculty of the Center for Research on Behavioral Health, Media, & Technology; and Pitt Cyber Affiliate Scholar, University of Pittsburgh 

Todd Wolynn, CEO, Kids Plus Pediatrics 

February 16 | 2-3:30 pm 

REGISTER NOW!"

The Post Office Mess Is Meant to Exhaust You. Don’t Let It.; The New York Times, August 17, 2020

Charlie Warzel, The New York Times; The Post Office Mess Is Meant to Exhaust You. Don’t Let It.

Trump is “flooding the zone.” It’s a form of modern censorship.

"Despite Mr. Swan’s persistent and admirable grilling and calling out of the president’s lies, a number of Mr. Trump’s claims (including one about climate change) slipped past unchallenged. Had Mr. Swan rebutted each one, the conversation would have ground to a halt — there were simply too many lies per minute.

It’s exhausting and deliberate, part of a strategy best explained by the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon to “flood the zone” with garbage information. Vox’s Sean Illing detailed this in February, suggesting that the strategy was one reason that Mr. Trump’s impeachment did little to change public opinion of the president.

Flooding the zone, Mr. Illing wrote, “seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories. And it produces a certain nihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search.” It is, as many have noted, a form of modern censorship and has an effect on the media, causing journalists to waste time not just chasing lies but also repeating them. Each time we speak out against a lie — especially if we’re not careful in how we frame it — we risk also giving it the oxygen it needs to spread."

This was the week America lost the war on misinformation; The Washington Post, July 30, 2020

Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post

; This was the week America lost the war on misinformation

"Some new research, out just this morning from Pew, tells us in painstaking numerical form exactly what’s going on, and it’s not pretty: Americans who rely on social media as their pathway to news are more ignorant and more misinformed than those who come to news through print, a news app on their phones or network TV.

And that group is growing...

They’re absorbing fake news, but they don’t see it as a problem. In a society that depends on an informed citizenry to make reasonably intelligent decisions about self-governance, this is the worst kind of trouble.

And the president — who knows exactly what he is doing — is making it far, far worse. His war on the nation’s traditional press is a part of the same scheme: information warfare, meant to mess with reality and sow as much confusion as possible."

‘Stable genius’ or dangerous ignoramus?'; The Washington Post, April 24, 2020

Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post; ‘Stable genius’ or dangerous ignoramus?

"We can laugh (uproariously) about Trump’s ignorance and inanity, but like his hawking of hydroxychloroquine — which induced hoarding of medication needed by patients with other diseases (and perhaps others to harm themselves) — this is one more instance in which concern for public safety should spur news networks to discontinue live coverage of the daily briefings. Like a con man peddling patent medicine, Trump dispenses false hope and crackpot remedies, thereby promoting disdain for scientific inquiry and valid research. Once more, one is compelled not only to shudder that such an intellectually unfit man could be president but that legions of right-wing hucksters and sycophants could regularly contort themselves not merely to defend his blabbering but also to lionize him.

It is little wonder that only 23 percent of Americans, according to the latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, have a high level of trust in what Trump says. (Some of us find it disturbing the number is that high, although the poll was taken before his latest quackery.)"

SLAPP Suit Filed Against Fox News Over Awful & Dangerous COVID-19 Coverage; TechDirt, April 6, 2020

Mike Masnick, TechDirt; 

SLAPP Suit Filed Against Fox News Over Awful & Dangerous COVID-19 Coverage

"As despicable and awful as Fox News' coverage has been, it's all been protected free speech."

Russian media ‘spreading Covid-19 disinformation’; The Guardian, March 18, 2020

Jennifer Rankin, The Guardian; Russian media ‘spreading Covid-19 disinformation’ 

Leaked EU report says pro-Kremlin outlets seeking to aggravate public health crisis

"“Whoever is spreading the disinformation is essentially playing with people’s lives,” Stano said. “Every responsible social media or media user should be aware of this: that there is a lot of misinformation circulating around … Double check, triple check, go to a media you really trust and look at the sources.”"

Shepard Smith, Late of Fox News, Gives $500,000 to a Free Press Group; The New York Times, November 21, 2019

Michael M. Grynbaum, The New York Times; Shepard Smith, Late of Fox News, Gives $500,000 to a Free Press Group

"“Our belief a decade ago that the online revolution would liberate us now seems a bit premature, doesn’t it?” Mr. Smith said in his customary Mississippi lilt. “Autocrats have learned how to use those same online tools to shore up their power. They flood the world of information with garbage and lies, masquerading as news. There’s a phrase for that.”...

The Committee to Protect Journalists, founded in 1981, works to advance press freedoms, particularly in dictatorial and autocratic countries. In recent years, speakers at its gala have increasingly referred to Mr. Trump’s attacks on the press and the hostile atmosphere faced by American journalists.

On Thursday, the group presented its Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award to Zaffar Abbas, the editor of a daily Pakistani newspaper, Dawn. The other honorees were Patrícia Campos Mello, a journalist at a Brazilian publication, Folha de S. Paulo; Neha Dixit, a freelance investigative journalist in India; two Nicaraguan broadcast journalists, Lucía Pineda Ubau and Miguel Mora, who were imprisoned for 172 days on false charges; and Maxence Melo Mubyazi, a journalist in Tanzania."

California makes ‘deepfake’ videos illegal, but law may be hard to enforce; The Guardian, October 7, 2019

Kari Paul, The Guardian; California makes ‘deepfake’ videos illegal, but law may be hard to enforce 

AB 730 makes it illegal to circulate doctored videos, images or audio of politicians within 60 days of an election

"California made it illegal to create or distribute “deepfakes” in a move meant to protect voters from misinformation but may be difficult to enforce.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, on Thursday signed legislation that makes it illegal to create or distribute videos, images, or audio of politicians doctored to resemble real footage within 60 days of an election.

Deepfakes are videos manipulated by artificial intelligence to overlay images of celebrity faces on others’ bodies, and are meant to make viewers think they are real."

Inside the Deepfake ‘Arms Race’; The Daily Beast, October 7, 2019

David Axe, The Daily Beast; Inside the Deepfake ‘Arms Race’

Can countermeasures neutralize the coming wave of high-tech disinformation?

"The first deepfakes appeared in late 2017 on Reddit. An anonymous user calling themselves “deepfakes”—a portmanteau of artificial-intelligence “deep learning” and “fakes”—imposed celebrities’ faces on pornography...

A deepfake video, still image, or audio recording is the product of a clever bit of coding called a “generative adversarial network,” or GAN. A GAN has two components: a discriminator and a generator. The discriminator is trying to tell fake media from real media. The generator is trying to fool the discriminator with increasingly realistic-seeming fakes."

The misinformation age; Axios, September 12, 2019

Scott Rosenberg, David Nather, Axios; The misinformation age

"Hostile powers undermining elections. Deepfake video and audio. Bots and trolls, phishing and fake news — plus of course old-fashioned spin and lies. 

Why it matters: The sheer volume of assaults on fact and truth is undermining trust not just in politics and government, but also in business, tech, science and health care as well.

• Beginning with this article, Axios is launching a series to help you navigate this new avalanche of misinformation, and illuminate its impact on America and the globe, through 2020 and beyond.

Our culture now broadly distrusts most claims to truth. Majorities of Americans say they've lost trust in the federal government and each other — and think that lack of trust gets in the way of solving problems, according to a Pew Research Center survey."

Facebook under pressure to halt rise of anti-vaccination groups; The Guardian, February 12, 2019

Ed Pilkington and Jessica Glenza, The Guardian; Facebook under pressure to halt rise of anti-vaccination groups

"Dr Noni MacDonald, a professor of pediatrics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, who has worked as an expert adviser to the WHO on immunization, questioned why Facebook was unrestrained by the stringent controls against misinformation put on drug companies. “We don’t let big pharma or big food or big radio companies do this, so why should we let this happen in this venue?”

She added: “When a drug company puts a drug up in the formal media, they can’t tell you something false or they will be sued. So why is this different? Why is this allowed?”"

Why 'justice' prevailed in 2018, according to Merriam-Webster; CNN, December 17, 2018

Rob Picheta, CNN; Why 'justice' prevailed in 2018, according to Merriam-Webster

[Kip Currier: 3,000th post since I launched this blog in 2010.]

"Robert Mueller's investigation of US President Donald Trump; Brett Kavanaugh's tense hearings in Congress; the fight for social, racial and gender equality: the past year has seen an absorbing and tumultuous news cycle. 

And now, "justice" -- the crux of some of the most gripping stories of the past 12 months -- has been recognized for its central place in the public consciousness.

 

US publishing company Merriam-Webster has named the noun its Word of the Year for 2018, after it saw a 74% spike in look-ups compared with 2017.

 

"The concept of justice was at the center of many of our national debates in the past year: racial justice, social justice, criminal justice, economic justice," the company said when explaining its choice..

 

The move follows Oxford Dictionaries' decision to crown "toxic" its word of the year, and Dictionary.com's selection of "misinformation" as its winner."

Meet the Bottomless Pinocchio, a new rating for a false claim repeated over and over again; The Washington Post, December 10, 2018

Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post; Meet the Bottomless Pinocchio, a new rating for a false claim repeated over and over again

"Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact-checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.

Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.

To accurately reflect this phenomenon, The Washington Post Fact Checker is introducing a new category — the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation."

‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America; The Washington Post, November 17, 2018

Eli Saslow, The Washington Post; ‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America

"She had seen hundreds of stories on Facebook about the threat of sharia, and this confirmed much of what she already believed. It was probably true, she thought. It was true enough.

“Do people understand that things like this are happening in this country?” she said. She clicked the post and the traffic registered back to a computer in Maine, where Blair watched another story go viral and wondered when his audience would get his joke."

Emattled and in over his head, Mark Zuckerberg should — at least — step down as Facebook chairman; The Washington Post, November 19, 2018

Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post; Emattled and in over his head, Mark Zuckerberg should — at least — step down as Facebook chairman

"Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once set out a bit of digital-world wisdom that became his company’s informal motto: “Move fast and break things.”

After the past week’s developments, the 34-year-old should declare mission accomplished — and find something else to do for the next few decades.

Because he’s shown that he’s incapable of leading the broken behemoth that is Facebook.

Leaders — capable leaders — don’t do what Zuckerberg has done in the face of disaster that they themselves have presided over.

They don’t hide and deny.

They don’t blame-shift."